By Amy Lindholm, Management Analyst, Friend of the Court Bureau
What are we really trying to accomplish through our services?
The Michigan child support program’s strategic plan states a vision of
“engaging parents to improve children’s lives,” and that our purpose is “to
achieve families’ well-being and self-sufficiency through a family-centered,
holistic approach.” We want to improve
children’s lives and strive for entire families’ well-being and
self-sufficiency, yet we typically only try to interact, beyond information-gathering,
with the parent who is supposed to pay child support. And this usually only
happens when that person is not paying enough, and then we make contact through
a punitive action or threat of punishment.
How can we actually get better at “engaging parents”? We know that a lot people with a case avoid any contact with our program, and when we start asking parents why, some of the responses are that they are not experiencing individualized treatment or feel they are not truly heard. And this is understandable to anyone who has worked an enormous FOC caseload and felt the pressure of limited time to spread across hundreds of cases.
Others have expressed that sometimes the services we provide create difficulty and conflict within families. Can we do things differently to better engage parents and increase our positive impact to their children?Shifting Our Service Approach
To try to focus more on the entire family’s well-being, the State Court Administrative Office’s Friend of the Court Bureau (FOCB) received grant funding from The Kresge Foundation to plan how FOC offices can implement a two-generational (2Gen) approach to services. “2Gen” is the most common term used for these approaches, but readers might know the concepts by another name with the same meaning, like “multigenerational” or “whole family.” Ascend at the Aspen Institute has released a lot of resources about 2Gen approaches. Regardless of which term is used, the goal is to build family well-being by intentionally and simultaneously working with children and the adults in their lives together. These approaches center on the whole family to create a legacy of success and economic prosperity that passes from one generation to the next and breaks the generational cycle of circumstances that limit the ability to thrive.
2Gen program examples in child support and other family law
matters are pretty rare and new compared to fields like education or housing. The
Colorado child support program has been working to develop and implement its
2Gen approach for a few years now, and it has worked with evaluators and
published early findings and program guides. The Colorado guides make it clear that
in order to connect families to other helpful services like employment training
or placement, its staff needed the skills and ability to communicate with
parents from a strengths-based perspective (e.g., “Where does this parent excel?
What is going well?”) that encouraged growth rather than the traditional
compliance-based, or deficit-based perspective (e.g., “This parent is not
paying child support; and needs to pay right away or else.”). Colorado found
that motivational interviewing was a critical skill for their project’s success.
Taking the lead from Colorado, we are implementing motivational interviewing
training as an initial step to providing a whole-family approach to friend of
the court services.
Applying Motivational Interviewing to Our Work
Motivational interviewing is a communication technique. It
teaches you how to shift from shaming, blaming, labeling, punishing, or fixing,
to instead acknowledging that this person really has the power to change the
person’s own situation if motivated to do so, and reflecting to the potential
for change from the person’s own words and steps to make that change a reality.
The technique also helps people become more engaged and empathetic listeners, which
means more efficiently understanding what is really going on with families and
how they would like us to help.
The Macomb County Friend of the Court started
training its staff in motivational interviewing in 2019. Next, the Office
of Child Support also provided training to its support specialists. Macomb FOC
Director Tom Blohm reflected on his staff’s training, saying that although the
training was good and improved communication skills, it could have been better
because it was not tailored to the FOC world, so it was hard to translate into
practice in everyday work. To make these improvements, FOCB worked with
motivational interviewing expert trainers to create an in-depth curriculum
focused on child support, custody, and parenting time. The trainers learned
about the FOC world through site visits to FOC offices and program focus groups.
The pilot of this new curriculum began in January 2023 at
the Genesee County Friend of the Court, with a few additional trainees from the
FOCB team and a handful of FOC offices in other counties. There was great
attendance for this pilot delivery:
- Basic training - 74 attendees completed the 16-hour training;
- Advanced - 58 attendees completed the 16-hour training; and
- Train-the-Trainer - 19 attendees completed the 24-hour training.
From the first day of the basic training, instructors
Vanessa Reading and Meghan Perrault made the training sessions very
interactive. The introductory and advanced training sessions included lecture,
group activities, and partner work. The training focused on four processes:
engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning. To learn these strategies, trainees
were encouraged to partner with people they did not already know to make role
play and discussion more focused and authentic. In the train-the-trainer
series, the 12 attendees created and presented their own motivational
interviewing trainings.
For example, one activity required trainees to practice
asking open ended questions with one trainee acting as FOC staff and the other
acting as the customer. This activity was focused on allowing customers to
engage with the employee, expand on their issues, and feel supported. This
activity allowed trainees to get comfortable asking open ended questions, just
as they would in their jobs as FOC staff. This is just one example of the
numerous interactive activities that trainees participated in to practice the
core skills of motivational interviewing.
FOCB Management Analyst Lindsay Poetz participated in the
basic and advanced training sessions. “I am glad that we were pushed out of our
comfort zones when learning Motivational Interviewing techniques,” Poetz said.
“Often we are confronted with difficult issues in customer service and need to receive
realistic experience dealing with these challenges in order to effectively help
parents.”
The trainers evaluated participation throughout the
sessions, looking for engagement, discussion, and knowledge of the concepts.
They also gave a written exam at the end of advanced training. They used this
combination of factors to determine who had an adequate mastery of the material
to start learning how to train others.
What Did FOC Staff Think of Motivational Interviewing
Training?
Attendees consistently rated the new training very highly. Most reported that the topic was new to them, and they gained a lot that will help them in their work.
And digging deeper into the evaluation feedback, as attendees completed the advanced or train-the-trainer series, they were more likely to report knowing about the topic before the training.
We asked the pilot training attendees what was most and
least valuable and gave a place for open-ended feedback. There was some
feedback about specific motivational interviewing skills that people were still
struggling to master. Some repeated themes that attendees found "most valuable”
included:
- Learning about asking open-ended questions;
- Learning about different types of language people use (change talk, sustain talk, discord) and what it signals for how to respond;
- Learning how to structure reflections and affirmations; and
- The variety of training delivery methods used (lecture, videos, and role play).
Many attendees expressed great satisfaction with the
training:
“Meg and Vanessa were fantastic trainers. They were warm,
funny, knowledgeable, supportive and really made it feel like a safe space to
learn and try new things. I probably learned more from this training than any I
have attended during my time in the child support program. I would highly
recommend this training for other offices, as well as other trainings
facilitated by Meg and Vanessa.”
“The content of the training can be put into action in our
day-to-day work.”
“Honestly one of the best trainings I’ve attended in a long
time. Excited for the next one! And thank you for addressing how to use Motivational
Interviewing under a time crunch!’”
“Engagement between one of the presenters and one of the
staff members was most beneficial. Actually seeing the communication between
the expert in Motivational Interviewing and our FOC staff on a topic we deal
with frequently was extremely beneficial. I really enjoyed the ‘real play’
between one of us and the instructor.”
The trainers were equally positive about their experience
delivering the training, saying that the group was the most impressive they
have trained to date, with an exceptional number of people showing a strong
grasp of the concepts. Meghan Perrault said of the group:
“The Michigan FOC will be trailblazers in the application of
Motivational Interviewing, which will guide staff to engage the public and
increase services that will support families on many levels. The
opportunity to create a new curriculum – moving from behavioral health to the
specific application of the FOC – was challenging but rewarding. We
watched participants absorb the material, conceptualize the application to
their role, and report successful interactions. We concluded the program with a
cohort of Motivational Interviewing Champions who displayed an impressive
understanding of the concepts, created unique ways to teach others,
and communicated a desire to improve the relationship between the FOC and
those served.”
What’s Next?
With so many highly performing trainees and interest in
learning more, another cohort of motivational interviewing champions will be
trained in the coming months, with the hope that these champions will then
bring that knowledge back to their colleagues in their office and surrounding
counties. FOC offices in counties besides Genesee are also beginning to request
the training from FOCB staff. Additionally, at the July Friend of the Court
Association conference, FOCB Director Steve Capps and Genesee FOC Director Tony
McDowell will give an introduction to motivational interviewing session to FOC
directors and managers. If your office would like to request training, please
reach out by email to LindholmA@courts.mi.gov.
Amy Lindholm holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Grand Valley State University. She came to the State Court Administrative Office’s Friend of the Court Bureau after managing a small international development nonprofit agency and previously working in a friend of the court office.
